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Emile comments on Reading the Sequences before Starting to Post: Costs and Benefits - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
Note that the costs you list are mostly to the individual in question, whereas many of the benefits are to the community in general, or to other contributors. It might be worth listing the costs to the community of asking people to read the sequences, but I don't see many: To me, "might discourage some people from contributing" is a feature, not a bug, and I'd be happy if LW was considered as "a forum for people who read the sequences".
Additional benefits
Filtering: Encouraging people to read the sequences before bringing up their own ideas on Friendly AI or Morality may filter out cranks or just people who aren't very good at expressing themselves or who are a bit intellectually lazy (lacking scholarship, not willing to question their ideas, etc.).
Avoiding redundancy: Many topics have been well covered in the sequences, additional intro material on those topics is not needed (as has been done a couple of times on decision theory), unless it's really good. The same goes for "new" ideas on how to do Friendly AI, what the basis of morality is, etc.
The sequences form an index of EY material. There is not a similar index for non-EY posts from 2009 on.
Well, there is an index: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong/All_articles
Most useful, thank you!
(I wonder when someone will put together a page for the "Race and IQ" sequence.)
Agreed, which is why you seldom hear "you n00b, go read the dozens of unindexed posts!". It's a bit of a pity those aren't better indexed - a few of them are referenced on the wiki, but I don't know how many people use it to look for new posts to read (I know the wiki helped me when looking for older posts on decision theory).
A bloglike thing like LessWrong may not be the best format for collecting information for a rationalist community. Maybe it would be better to use some kind of of rationalist wiki ;-)
People have started indexing a few Yvain, Alicorn, and lukeprog posts into minor sequences.